Monthly Archives: April 2013

OK, I migrated Lightroom, Outlook and iTunes from original PC to new PC without losing gigabytes of metadata, years of e-mail or hundreds of playlists. Extracting those successfully from a dead PC is quite an achievement and I’m feeling clever, which means now is a good time to stop for the night. Time instead to enjoy Friday night curled up on the couch with Nikki and Netflix.

Tomorrow, I have a new challenge: My first column in the newspaper. I have no name for it yet. I hope by morning to have come up with a name I like. I also have a few back end things to get ready before then, and some links to prepare. Sometime toward mid-afternoon I may get to finally plug my Wacom tablet into this new beast I built and put her to the test with some serious Photoshop and After Effects heavy lifting. I have a backlog of video sitting here waiting for editing and it isn’t going to take care of itself. After that I may get started on that book I’ve been planning. But that, as they say, is another story. Onwards and upwards!

This weekend promises to be a very busy weekend for me. First, I upgraded my computer. Instead of doing it the easy, way, transferring files gracefully from my old one to the new, I left it a day late and a dollar short. I literally had the two computers side-by-side ready to do things the easy way…when the old one gave up the ghost. Bum. Had to pull the hard drives and take ownership of the files, then begin the laborious manual transfer of files. That is the easy part. Having to recreate 6 years worth of program settings, e-mail filtering rules and archives begins tonight. That is the beginning of my weekend and I think I have everything ready…I’ll find out soon enough.

Dear Diary: Today I was inducted into the serried ranks of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. Actually, this happened a few weeks ago but the paperwork only landed today. The membership of this professional body comprises some of the brightest and the best in the fields of creative photography and design. And now, they have me.

By default Photoshop lists the last 10 files you worked on under Recent Files. If, like me, you jump through a couple or three dozen files per day, finding the one you worked on an hour ago can be frustrating. Particularly if that file would have been number eleven or nineteen: It doesn’t show on the Recent Files list. At that point it is time to scream and frantically search your entire hard drive with the boss breathing down your neck… but wait. There is a way around this. You’ll like this…

Go to Preferences (CTRL-K, CMD-K on Mac) and choose the File Handling tab. At the bottom, ‘Recent File List Contains’ shows a box containing a number, by default ’10’. Type 20, or whatever you think is needed. Close preferences. OK, that will help in future, but how will that help find number nineteen now, you ask? Here is how, I answer: Photoshop actually remembers more than the default number it shows. It simply limits the Recent Files display to the number you tell it to. By changing this to 20, you force it to display more. Which means…

Go back to File > Open > Recent Files…and see that Photoshop now shows the 20 most recent files, INCLUDING NUMBER NINETEEN! You can now impress your boss with your incredible organizational skills, and get that raise. And if you think this tip could help others, pass it along. CheerS!

Witty, urbane, stylish. These are just some of the words which have not been used to describe this blog…